The Bumpkinification of the Midterm Elections

Joni Ernst, the Iowa state senator and Iraq War veteran, was standing in a barn in a purple flannel shirt and an unzipped vest. Beside her, various swine burrowed in the hog lot; two small pigs spooned; there was copious squealing. When Ernst, who grew up on a farm castrating hogs, opened her mouth to speak, she drew the inevitable connection between her upbringing and her current role as a Republican candidate for the United States Senate. “When I get to Washington, I’ll know how to cut pork,” Ernst said, smiling. Title cards reinforced her credentials. (“Joni Ernst: Mother. Soldier. Conservative.”) “I’m Joni Ernst, and I approve this message because Washington is full of big spenders. Let’s make ‘em squeal.”

The 30-second spot, titled “Squeal,” was part of a trilogy of ads for the candidate released earlier this year. In another, Ernst, enrobed in a biker jacket, rides a Harley-Davidson to a gun range. (“Joni Ernst: Set Sights on Obamacare”). In a third, titled “Biscuits,” the camera focuses on a man’s hands as they add butter to flour and use molds to cut circles. “When I was working fast food, I learned the key to a great biscuit is lots of fat,” Ernst tells the camera. “Problem is, Washington thinks the same thing about our budget.”

Ernst is not the only candidate to have brought such a Capra-esque advertising strategy to this year’s midterm elections. Something Else Strategies, the media-consulting firm responsible for “Squeal,” also masterminded a widely noted spot for the Republican Mike McFadden, who is challenging Al Franken for his Senate seat in Minnesota. McFadden, a former college-football player who now coaches a youth team, recruited his players to appear in a “Bad News Bears"-style spot in which they mess up handoffs (“Washington is fumbling our future”) and clobber each other (“Obamacare needs to be sacked”) before the coach rouses them to “get out there and hit somebody.” At that point, for no particular reason, one player hits him below the belt, leaving the coach to recite the “I’m Mike McFadden, and I approve this message” bit in a high-pitched squeal — the universal signifier of a guy who has just been hit in his junk.

Critics of the McFadden ad questioned whether such a joke might fall beneath the dignity of a prospective United States senator. A McFadden spokesman earnestly responded that the hit, in fact, landed “in the gut” and that the candidate’s falsetto resulted from having the wind knocked out of him. (To be fair, no one browbeat Bob Quast, an Independent Senate candidate in Iowa, after his ad warned potential home intruders that he would “use my Glock to blow your balls off.”) But the critics were missing a crucial point. McFadden, a former investment banker with a law degree from Georgetown, was debasing not only his opponent but also, quite explicitly, himself. He’s in good company. “Somebody once said if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog,” John Barrow, the deep-drawling, flannel-shirted Democratic congressman from Georgia, recently told the camera as he threw a tennis ball to a golden retriever. “Well, I wouldn’t wish Washington on a dog.” Left unsaid, of course, is why the Harvard Law graduate is running for the punishment of spending his sixth term in the capital. “Barrow is great at filming campaign ads,” says David Wasserman, who tracks House races for The Cook Political Report. “He is especially great at bumpkinizing.”

As we have often been reminded, this was supposed to be a very important election cycle. The Republicans’ hopes of retaking the Senate could easily hinge on squeaker races like Ernst’s in Iowa. This, along with the possibility of padding their majority in the House, would be a significant development for the nation, just as the issues loom huge, complex and ISIS-Ebola scary. And yet countless candidates seem determined to tout their fitness for these enormous challenges by trying to out-bumpkin one another. This spring, Ernst’s opponent, Bruce Braley, a four-term congressman, assured voters that he “grew up doing farm jobs and working a grain elevator.”

There is, of course, a delicate art to bumpkinizing. Republicans, in particular, have been burned in recent Senate elections by nominating candidates — Christine O’Donnell, for instance, or Todd Akin — who turned out to be too bumpkin for their own good and imploded in winnable races. This time around, the strategy has been tweaked: If you want to come off as an amateur, it’s helpful to be a pro of some sort. One of the year’s more unlikely populist heroes, after all, is a cowboy poet from South Dakota named Larry Pressler. This Washington outsider, who is running for Senate as an Independent, also happens to be a former Republican senator and a lobbyist who has considered running for mayor of Washington.

Skilled politicians have a proud tradition of conveying utter contempt for their profession, especially when they’re running to keep their jobs. This is, to some degree, rooted in our history. As they drafted the Constitution, the founding fathers envisioned that their new republic would be governed by a temporary leadership class of farmers, doctors and assorted commoners who would retain close ties to their communities. Self-styled feisty populists, like Andrew Jackson, tended to denigrate the well-bred qualities of their opponents. “Andrew Jackson, who can fight” was how the decorated general sold himself in the 1828 presidential campaign, compared with “John Quincy Adams, who can write.” Jackson, who in fact was a wealthy and experienced politician, won easily.

The historian Garry Wills has referred to this entrenched American tendency as “the glorification of the amateur and contempt for the professional.” This dynamic was heightened during the 1960s, and even more so after Watergate, when an increasingly antiestablishment electorate gravitated toward candidates who could prove that they had no link to the professional order. The 75 new Democrats who were elected to Congress in 1974 — the so-called Watergate babies — swept in largely on a promise to overturn “traditional” politics. The Republican House overthrow of 1994, in response to Bill Clinton’s shaky first couple of years, was grounded in fashioning a class of 73 anti-Washington Washingtonians. Led by Newt Gingrich, nearly all of them were committed to term limits and to spending as little time in Washington as possible. (For the record, many of them are still there.)

The apotheosis of the modern bumpkin mode has been embodied by Sarah Palin, who nearly found herself one 72-year-old heartbeat from our highest national office. Palin, the starkest example yet of a proud unsophisticate taking the national stage, has remained visible and unapologetic. She also appears to have made little attempt to fill the knowledge gaps she demonstrated in 2008 or to shed her association with reality-TV-style family dramas, like the recent drunken brawl she apparently observed at an Anchorage birthday party. According to Alan Schroeder, a professor of journalism at Northeastern University and an expert on the celebrity aspects of politics, Palin has come to represent “a new standard of the slim résumé.”

Palin may have had a rare talent, if somewhat limited appeal, but the outsider streak of this year’s midterms comes in response to a unique and distinctly awful political landscape. Not only is President Obama’s popularity in free fall, but whatever Everyman credibility he mustered during his “Washington Outsider” candidacy in 2008 has long since been dissipated through the regal isolation of his office and the suspicion that he is aloof and presumably ill equipped at castrating hogs. He is, in other words, politically toxic. Braley was willing to abide a visit on his behalf from Michelle Obama, but he undoubtedly benefited from the fact that the first lady repeatedly mispronounced his name as “Bailey.”

Candidates themselves don’t deserve all the blame for their bumpkinizing. Much of that rests with the blizzards of money being blown from wealthy donors and super PACs to a growing oligarchy of media consultants, who typically live on the coasts and work for multiple candidates at once. In a D.C. twist, those bumpkins we see on our screens are often not even real bumpkins so much as some rich guy’s idea of what a bumpkin should be. One telltale signal is how familiar the props are — the livestock, the guns, the motorcycles, the dogs and, of course, the flannel. An ad for Rob Maness, a Louisiana Republican running for the Senate, features a trifecta: a gun, an airboat and an alligator.

In large part, this is what we have to show for the nearly $4 billion that is expected to be spent in this campaign, the most of any midterm election in history. “When you have this much outside spending, way too much of the advertising has no soul,” acknowledged Todd Harris, a partner at Something Else Strategies, who is based in Washington, far from his clients Ernst and McFadden. The people who are creating these spots, in other words, don’t have much connection to the state they’re working in. It’s a good bet that few at Something Else Strategies have spent much time on hog farms. They are paid either way.

I was thinking about the 2014 midterms as I rewatched “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” the classic Frank Capra movie that celebrated its 75th anniversary last month. In a sense, Jefferson Smith, the plucked-from-nowhere senator played by Jimmy Stewart, came to represent the ideal of the pure-hearted Washington bumpkin. Mr. Smith is a naïve outsider with quirky habits (he trains pigeons!) and a determination to live up to the ideals embodied by the monuments he so admired. His capacity for umbrage at the corrupt ways of his colleagues and the press made him an admirable foil. Likewise, he willingly engaged in a filibuster for 24 hours — just like the highflying outsiders of recent cycles, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.

But Smith’s antics are actually geared toward pending legislation. He does not care about getting attention, let alone harbor any ambition of running for president. In real life, Cruz and Paul have no background in legislating or have shown no interest in it, in part because it might taint them as Washington “professionals” in places like Iowa.

Meantime, as Election Day loomed, Joni Ernst returned to her roots. In late October, as she held onto a narrow margin, her campaign released a new ad featuring the candidate in another flannel shirt and vest, surrounded by still more snorting pigs. “Dirty, noisy, and it stinks,” Ernst complains. “Not this lot — I’m talking about the one in Washington.” Her campaign issued a statement assuring everyone that the ad featured the same hogs that appeared in “Squeal,” “although they’re older and bigger now.” It was also produced by the same media consultants, who are also older now and, presumably, richer too.

Mark Leibovich is the magazine’s chief national correspondent and the author of the forthcoming book “Citizens of the Green Room.”